This invention relates to a building evacuation system and more particularly to a permanently installed slide-and-bucket evacuation system.
Numerous building evacuation systems for high-rise buildings incorporating chutes, slides and the like have been described in the prior art. Attention is directed, for example, to U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,392,877; 4,037,685 and 4,398,621 as typical, but by no means exhaustive, examples. A major concern in all such systems is the provision of an adequate braking system so as to control the rate of descent of the evacuees. Such braking systems are relatively expensive to install and maintain and there is a need for a simple, but effective and relatively inexpensive, system for evacuating high-rise buildings while controlling the rate of descent of the evacuees, which can be easily installed in new buildings or retrofitted in existing buildings.
An object of the present invention is to provide a simple building evacuation system, incorporating a progressively applied braking system to retard the rate of fall of the evacuee, which is easy to use and which can evacuate large numbers of people very quickly.
By one aspect of this invention there is provided a building evacuation system comprising:
at least one open-ended, substantially vertical, evacuation chute for each floor of a building to be evacuated, each said chute having a plurality of parallel spaced apart guide tracks;
a pair of substantially horizontal parallel rails suspended above each said floor;
a plurality of collapsible buckets including a plurality of rollers slidable on said horizontal parallel rails, each said bucket being adapted to receive and releasably retain at least one building evacuee;
means to transfer a loaded said bucket and the rollers thereof from said horizontal rails into slidable engagement with said guide tracks in a selected one of said vertical evacuation chutes;
tapered brake pad means contained within said guide tracks and arranged so as to progressively retard the rate of fall of said loaded bucket in said evacuation chute;
slide means adjacent a lower open end of said evacuation chute, arranged so as to receive a loaded bucket exiting said lower end of said evacuation chute and slidably transfer said loaded bucket to ground level.